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When I first saw the recently released First Bank results, the image that came to my mind was that of a man trying to scour the pit latrine in my secondary school.

Funnily enough, the new GMD at First Holdco is an old student, and he can attest to the putrid smell and dastardly state of those things we used to call “shalanga.”

Mr Otedola, by sinking his hard-earned funds into this “sick” elephant, was actually rolling up his sleeves, putting on rain boots, covering his nose with a mask, and going to work.

Cleaning up decades of decadent corruption in what used to be Nigeria’s biggest bank cannot be an easy task, and these figures attest to that.

A full charge of N748.1b impairment for the year, following the CBN deadline of 31st Dec, throws up years of dangerous living by those who had strangled the bank all these years.

This elephant has undergone serial rape, which involved the desecration of corporate governance, weak internal regulation, poor credit management, and a half-hearted loan recovery mechanism.

This opened it up to fraud, both internal and external, leading to a malnourished elephant that can no longer vie for market leadership. Let’s take a closer look at the results.

This impairment charge is said to represent about 11% of the bank’s total loan book, which stands at about N7 trillion and which, by industry standards, in itself is high, if not the highest.

As if this is not enough, the bank’s cost drive is almost 3x the industry average.

Its advertising and marketing cost at N185b is really high, at 25% of OPEX.

Another area is maintenance, which hit N151b, and other OPEX surged by about 44%, further weakening the indices.

If I were to sit with Mr Otedola on this matter, something I really want to do, I’d look him in the face and say: fire your Corporate Banking team NOW.

That is where the problem is. Most of these loans that are going or have gone bad were booked by this team.

FBN impairment from bad loans since 2015 till date stands at a staggering N2.2 trillion, a huge amount and an industry record.

As if this is not enough, the team is still not firing on all cylinders in growing revenue, and the reason for this is simple.

Corporate banking lacks the firepower of, say, an Abolore in Fidelity or a Dr Fasoranti in Zenith, whose skills in credit remain industry legend.

When you book weak credit and sum that up with weak relationship management, what you get is this tsunami of loans going bad and affecting the profit quality of the bank.

My advice to Mr Otedola, as he continues with his repair work, is to push out anyone who has spent more than five years in that team, because they are already contaminated with the “na me, na me” culture that ruled the bank just before the Otedola era.

The brilliant thing for First Bank is that their treasury team is a world-beater, as they continue to dominate earnings thrown up by the bank consistently, year in and year out.

Take, for example, the treasury team delivering income of N962b, up from N850b the previous year.